Pain, anger and frustration prompt us to lash out. I get it. Emotional circumstances trigger emotional responses. We’re human beings. Emotion is one of the things that sets us apart from every other species breathing the air on this planet. Our ability to reason is the other.
It seems we’ve become slaves to our emotions and have disregarded our ability to reason lately though. I’m not sure if we go straight for the emotional response because it’s simply easier, quicker or more fashionable. To apply reason to a situation requires time, research and thought in most cases. You don’t even have to use the word “apply” with emotion…it just happens with no effort at all.
I try to think everything through…get past the emotion and address everything logically. Insomnia has an evil way of making me lay awake at night and think things through regardless of whether it has any notable impact on me whatsoever. I’ve become somewhat of a stickler for getting to the root of an issue before I pass a judgment. Keep that in mind as you read the next couple paragraphs, roll your eyes and decide there’s no point in reading this entire post.
This past week we had a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas followed thirteen hours later by a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio. Count the one at the Garlic Festival in California and that makes three in a week. Those acts alone trigger a whole host of emotions within us; empathy, anger and fear being the big three. The method by which most of us are made aware of those acts ads sensationalism and drama to a situation which already has too much of each and then continuously beats us into a frenzy with around the clock coverage spewing “possibilities”, “estimates”, statements from “unnamed sources” and commentary from people who have no idea what’s going on at the crime scene but are somehow deemed a pertinent contributor to the conversation. It will be days…possibly weeks before we find out exactly what happened and why. Between now and then all you’re going to really get is a slew of emotional drama in an effort to keep you tuned in to that particular channel.
That slew of emotional drama is going to stir the pot on the gun control issue again…quite literally around the clock, every few minutes, on every news channel, website and radio show until some other big story comes along that will hold our attention a little better and keep their ratings up. If you haven’t noticed yet, that’s the cycle. Gun control is only an issue to the media and politicians until something bigger steals the headlines, and at that moment, we barely hear a peep about it until the next mass shooting. They REALLY don’t want to talk about gun control because it’s a hot button issue when it comes to elections, the country is heavily divided on the issue and (most importantly) it would take a constitutional amendment to do anything seriously damaging to gun rights in this country. Does anyone out there know what the last amendment to be ratified was? The 27th Amendment was finally ratified by two-thirds of the states in 1992…two hundred and three years after it was proposed in 1789. The 27th Amendment is about congressional pay; something that every American can agree requires regulation, and it took two centuries to ratify it. Imagine what it would be like trying to get anything ratified on firearms with the division in this country over the issue. Here’s a short and concise article on constitutional amendments if you’re interested in seeing how utterly hopeless it would be to try to change even one word in the Bill of Rights: https://news.yahoo.com/does-repeal-constitutional-amendment-155600793–election.html
I know what you’re thinking…we don’t need a constitutional amendment, we just need stricter laws. Well, murder is against the law and they didn’t obey that one. Assault with a deadly weapon is a law and they didn’t obey that one. Stricter background checks only make it more difficult to buy a gun legally…it doesn’t stop anyone from buying a gun. Laws only keep good people honest. If someone’s going to be evil, there’s no stopping it with legislation. Evil doesn’t obey laws.
I honestly wish I had the quick solution, but there isn’t one. You can take every “assault weapon” off the market tomorrow and there are still enough in civilian possession right now to arm an entire rebel force anywhere on the planet. You couldn’t find a tenth of them if the government decided to confiscate them. It’s an unrealistic thought process fueled by emotion. Trying to take the guns away from the people who own them would only lead to more bloodshed, I’m afraid. Trying to make it nearly impossible to obtain a firearm is an exercise in futility. There are probably a billion high capacity magazines in this country at the moment and they’re not serialized or accounted for in any way. Nearly half the people I know are stockpiled with ammunition and/or have the equipment and consumables to produce their own. Regardless of what legislation comes of this, it will be useless.
The push for gun control is a purely emotional response. There’s absolutely no logic behind laying the blame for someone’s death on a firearm. A firearm is merely a tool. You don’t credit the hammer when you drive a nail. The person swinging the hammer did the work; the hammer is just an implement to help the human accomplish the task. I could beat this topic up for the next five pages, but there are plenty of op-eds, social media memes and bumper stickers out there that do a fine enough job of that. Regardless where you fall on the “necessity of firearms” debate, the one thing that logic and reason will tell you that emotion fails to even inference is that a firearm is worthless without a human being behind the trigger.
I have a very large safe full of guns and shelves filled with boxes upon boxes of ammunition. If you see me on the streets, there’s a 50% chance that I’m armed. Not only do I have the hardware, I’m trained to use it accurately and effectively. I’m not just trained to hit where I’m aiming, I’m trained to tactically make the most effective use of the weapons at my disposal in the most efficient manner possible in order to cause the most carnage imaginable. You’d never guess it to talk to me, but I may be the most lethal person many of you have ever talked to. Yet not a single one of my firearms has taken a human life. But know this…I’d give up every gun and every round of ammunition if I thought for a minute it would save one child’s life. Damn near every responsible gun owner would do the same.
So, if guns aren’t the problem, what is? Freud said that everything is about sex. In his time he was probably relatively accurate in that statement. But I’ve been over this mass shooting issue in my mind a thousand times, peeling the onion back one layer at a time and every time I do it I end up with the same result. Interestingly enough, it’s the same result I come to when I attempt to dissect most of our social issues today. It’s definitely not about guns and it’s definitely not about sex. Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe when you get to the heart of the matter, it’s about money. Radix Malorum est Cupiditas…the root of evil is greed.
Okay, you can stop shaking your head now and remove the puzzled look from your face. It’s going to take me a few minutes but I’m going to explain my reasoning. Hopefully I can lay this out well enough to allow you to see things from my perspective. It’s going to be a little bit of journey to get there, but if you’re willing to bear with me for a short while maybe we can expand all of our minds and who knows…maybe change the direction of our society.
Once you eliminate the blaming of the guns in the equation, the only active members of every shooting incident is the human beings behind the sights of those weapons. Now…I would bet a whole box of donuts that not a single mass shooter had financial concerns on their mind while they were planning or executing the murder of innocent people. One exception to that might be the Las Vegas shooter from a couple years ago…the “why” to his actions has never been resolved, but he was a long time, high-stakes gambler so pardon the pun but all bets are off on him.
These kids weren’t born murderers. Something happened along the path of their lives to turn them in that direction. Go back to the Heath High School shooting (Paducah, KY) in 1997 and look at all the mass shooters up to Stoneman Douglas High School shooting (Parkland, FL) in 2018. Read them all…Virginia Tech, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Aurora Colorado…all of them. When you read the stories behind these people a lot of similarities start to jump out at you. Some of the words that seemingly appear in many of the shooter’s bios are Anxiety, Depression, Bullied, Unloved, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Psychosis, Bi-polar, Narcissism and Dysphoric Mania. Almost every one of them were under some sort of psychiatric care at multiple points of their lives. Nearly every one of them had been “flagged” by a law enforcement office, a psychiatrists office or a school official as someone who needed to be watched, yet there was no communication among them.
One word comes up in nearly every one of their backgrounds: Anti-Depressant. Zoloft, Geodon, Fluvoxamine, Celexa are all different mood altering pharmaceuticals and they are apparently the preferred prescription medications for potential mass shooters. If you fancy some light reading, entertain yourself with the side effects and precautions associated with these evil little bastards. Another thing that stands out as the onion gets peeled back on these kids is that many of them were prescribed these medications, but their toxicology report after the incident showed “No Drugs or Alcohol” in their system…which means they were off their meds at the time of the incident. I know for a fact that in a lot of cases the only thing worse than being on a medication is coming down off that medication. I’ve never been on an anti-depressant, but I have to imagine it’s like coming down off a series of pain meds….except the anti-depressants screw with your brain function.
For the most part these shooters all had dysfunctional home lives. Some being shuffled from one family member to another, others living in an environment where both parents were so consumed with their careers that they had no time for their families. Domestic instability is a common denominator in nearly all of their lives.
Testimony from their peers and information recovered through investigation after the incidents almost always reveals a long list of violent music, movies and video games as well as books ranging from the Anarchists Cookbook to Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto. The browser history on their computers is usually filled with searches on bomb building, weapons and tactics and every kind of hate rhetoric you can find on the web.
Yeah…I know what you’re thinking…you’re wondering how the hell money ties into all of this. I’m getting to that now. We need to go back in time a bit to make it all make sense thought.
Mass shootings have been occurring in this country since 1849. They were few and far between in the early part of the 20th century…so sparse that when Charles Whitman climbed into the bell tower at the University of Texas in 1966 it was dubbed by many the first mass shooting in America. That’s far from the truth though: http://behindthetower.org/a-brief-history-of-mass-shootings
What can’t be denied though is the frequency at which these shootings have occurred over the last 25 years. What changed in our society that would cause a shift of that magnitude? Here’s where it always comes down to money.
In the 1980’s the number of dual income families and single parent families in this country increased exponentially. It was initially viewed as a huge win for equal rights as housewives hung up their aprons, picked up a briefcase or lunchbox and headed into the workforce in greater numbers than we’d seen since World War II. Dual income households suddenly had more disposable income which aided in boosting the country out of recession. More people holding down jobs increased the amount of money collected in taxes and social security. Automobile sales shot up as nearly every household required two vehicles to accommodate both adults work schedules. With the increased auto sales came directly proportional gasoline sales which generated not only commerce but tax dollars as well. The domino effect was massive and touched almost every industry in the nation. Daycare businesses started popping up all over the country to accommodate the dual income families and single working mothers…as did fast food restaurants, auto repair shops, lawn services…anything to free up time for the working parents so they could put more hours in on the job…more jobs, more disposable income, more taxes being paid, lather, rinse, repeat.
Then things started going south in the mid 1990’s. It happened so slowly and incrementally that nobody even seemed to notice. Inflation started rising and along with it the cost of living rose. Taxes were going up but salaries and wages weren’t. Gas prices were going up and when they rise the cost of everything rises. By the end of the decade the dual income family didn’t produce more disposable income, it became the standard for living a moderately comfortable life in most cases…in others it became the only means of survival. Most single parent families found that one parent working multiple jobs just to try to squeak by. As a nation we became more job-centric and less family-centric.
The result of all of this: teenage kids raising themselves. In most American households family meals became few and far between. Children were coming home from a trying day at school to an empty house, overloaded with angst, emotion and stress without a sympathetic ear or guiding hand to be found. Parents consumed with their careers or trying to overcome the stress of trying to make ends meet came home late and couldn’t find time to get their own heads straight, let alone take the time to understand the drama of their children’s lives. Too much time at work and not enough time with the family results in a guilty conscience when you finally realize that your children are struggling and there’s no relief on the horizon. As a nation, parents shifted from spending time with their children to spending money on their children, substituting their presence in their children’s lives with things….electronic things for the most part. Televisions in their bedrooms with video game consoles attached to them. Then came the personal computers…then the smart phones. All this information and violence at a child’s fingertips with no parental guidance. That guilty conscience did a lot more than just cause parents to cover their absence with gadgets. It caused them to start pointing fingers at the education system and the teachers personally when their child got unruly or produced sub-par grades. We talk about it all the time….”we’d have got our asses handed to us had we acted like that in school”. As well, that guilt prompted parents to “not be so hard on the kids”….household chores fell by the wayside, leaving no sense of responsibility and no accountability in the children.
Okay….just stop….you’re getting pissy with me….your brow is down and you’re thinking that I’m pointing fingers at you personally. I’m not. I’m just as guilty as most of the rest of you in regards to that last paragraph. But our kids aren’t out spilling blood in the streets, are they? So apparently we did something right along the way. Our kids had chores. Our kids were held accountable for their actions and their grades. As busy as we were, we were involved. We went to the soccer games and the band competitions and scouting events. Yes we did…and while we were there, we saw those kids who didn’t have the parental guidance our kids did. You know the ones I’m talking about…the kids who always looked a little disheartened…the quiet kids…the ones who didn’t really seem to fit in with the rest of the team. The one’s whose parents rarely made an appearance at an event, came to a meeting or helped coach. Think back and you’ll remember those kids….and you’ll remember the next season those kids were nowhere to be found. Most of them were probably at home staring as some sort of television show or surfing a website that no child should be surfing.
Hell, open up your High School Yearbook. Look at your class photos. There’s always one kid who was just a little “dark”. You know the one I’m talking about. It’s been thirty five years, but I remember that kid. Turns out he was so awkward because he had a miserable home life…little parental supervision and even less parental guidance. He was home alone or walking the streets most days after school and didn’t really have many friends. The friends he did have were older and always in trouble. He was laughed at and bullied when we were young because he was so different and he became mean as hell by the time he was 16 years old as a simple defense mechanism against a life he felt was unfair to him. He ended up dropping out of school the very second he could legally do it and you just knew he was going to prison early in life. That was in the 1980’s…and that kid did go to prison. Now imagine if that kid had been listening to Marilyn Manson instead of Van Halen. Imagine if he’d been playing Call of Duty instead of Donkey Kong. Compare the listings of the 25 television channels we had back then to what’s playing on the 400 channels any kid has access to today. Imagine if that kid could’ve immersed himself in the violence and misogyny that the internet puts at your fingertips today. Guns were really no more difficult to acquire back then than they are now. Imagine that kid’s mindset if he’s surrounded by the technologically enhanced violence that kids have access to today, and then pollute his mind with anti-depressants. It’s not a very long stretch of the imagination to think that he could’ve done a lot more damage than just stabbing his girlfriend.
That’s where I think we’ve failed as a society. Not enough time spent stringing beans on the front porch and too much time spent involved in the dark side of technology. All these gadgets were supposed to make our lives better or easier….not become our focus in life. What they ended up doing was becoming an escape from reality. It became too easy to get a break from the stress of the day by sitting your kid in front of television, computer or video game console while we collected our thoughts. It became too easy to let the kids fall asleep in front of television screen while we unwound from the day than it was to read them a story and watch them drift off in our arms. Everyone bitches that no other country on the planet has the mass shootings that we have, and they always point to the fact that we have more guns than anyone else…but they never point to the fact that we have more kids with smartphones than anyone else too. One gun can put a bullet in every soul in a room in a matter of mere minutes. One website, one video, one song can reach millions of minds in a matter of seconds in today’s world and corrupt each and every soul it touches.
That’s what I see as the first part of the problem. The upside: we can fix this….keyword: WE. Not the politicians, not the education system, not the firearms manufacturers, not the cops, not the gun lobby, not the NRA, not the justice system, not even the President. Point fingers all you want, friends…but this is a societal problem and it’s going to take each and every one of us to fix it. We need to get back to the family. We need to get back to teaching what’s right…and more importantly, what’s wrong. We need to shelve political correctness and hold each other accountable….and the phrase “No Child Left Behind” should have nothing to do with the education system. If you see a kid struggling, not fitting in, getting bullied or excluded…take a minute and reach out. One simple act of kindness in one minute of one day can change the world. If you’re expecting the government to solve our problems…well just ask the Native American’s how well that worked out for them. I’ve seen nothing in my lifetime to lead me to believe our government has gained an ounce of common sense, decency or humanity since the massacre at Wounded Knee. They can’t fix this. They won’t fix this. This one’s up to us.
As I said…that’s the first part of the problem. Believe it or not, the dual income and single parent families are “little money” compared to the second half of the problem. However both problems are related in a “cause and effect” way and if we do our part we can probably strike a huge blow to the second half of the problem.
Let’s talk about anti-depressants for a couple minutes. I could run through the history of the drugs starting with Dr. Kuhn back in 1949 and bringing you up to date with the last four commercials you just saw during your local news. I’m not going to do that. The information is plentiful on the internet, so if you want to bore yourself to tears, be my guest.
First and foremost, I’d like you to think back to high school again. How many of your friends were on anti-depressants? I can’t recall a single one, and if you’re my age I’d almost bet you’re having a hard time coming up with a name as well. I knew a couple taking Ritalin for ADHD, but that was about the closest thing I can recall. If you’ve got a wild hair and a couple minutes take a look at this National Institute for Mental Health site: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2014/are-children-overmedicated.shtml There’s a lot of conjecture in there as to why the increases have happened over the last 25 years, but the actual numbers of adolescents on psycho-stimulant, psychotropic and anti-depressant pharmaceuticals are staggering. I’m not a psychiatrist…I’m not a doctor…Hell, I haven’t even stayed in a Holiday Inn Express for five years. (That’s another story for another time)…so I’m not going to second guess the medical profession on whether these kids need this stuff or not. My gut says no…but we’ll go forward with the assumption that each and every one of them NEED these drugs for some reason or other.
Now with that thought in mind, consider this. I’m 50 years old and my Doctor has me taking a baby aspirin every day. I’m a relatively disciplined guy and follow a pretty regimented schedule every morning and yet there are still days I forget that little pill. So what’s the odds that your average adolescent with all the strife and drama that they have in their lives remembers to take their pills three times a day every day? If I forget my baby aspirin one day it really doesn’t have too much of an effect on me…I just take one later in the day or skip that day and start again the next morning. If you skip your anti-depressant though you start throwing your brain out of balance. If you do it regularly, your mind is riding a roller coaster that’s going a little too fast for the turns ahead. As I wrote earlier, a few of these shooters who were prescribed anti-depressants had no “Drugs or Alcohol” in their system when their toxicity reports were completed.
Why don’t we hear about that on the news? Why are the politicians not railing against the medical system that prescribes these drugs instead of counseling the individual? Why is it the fault of the video games, the educations system, the music, the movies, the guns…but not the mind-altering pharmaceutical chemicals? One word again: Money.
Pharmaceutical lobbyists are spending about $250,000,000 a year in the D.C area to keep palms greased and votes moving in their favor. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=h04 Interestingly, their campaign contributions have risen from nearly nothing in 1990 to a whopping $63,000,000 in 2016. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/totals.php?cycle=2018&ind=h04 Let’s see…what else has increased dramatically over the last 30 years? Oh…that’s right…anti-depressants and psychotropic medications to adolescents. Wait a minute….There was something else, wasn’t there? Yeah…that’s right, ladies and gentlemen…mass shootings carried out by young men prescribed anti-depressants and psychotropics. I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot of damn coincidence for me, friends.
To be fair, firearm production has increased steadily throughout that time-frame as well, although quite a bit of that production has been removed from the national market in the form of exports. Spikes occurred directly after the Sandy Hook shooting, and again in 2016 when it was widely assumed that the Democratic candidate was a lock for the White House and would make gun control a priority. Federal background checks have increased tenfold over that 30 year span with less than 100,000 recorded in 1990 and more than 1,100,000 in 2016. Although we’re manufacturing more guns, we’re exporting more guns as well, and the background checks have seemingly been conducted in accordance with applicable laws. https://www.atf.gov/file/130436/download
Why don’t we hear about all of this? Well, let’s take a look at the commercials you see every time you turn the tube on. My television is off from dawn til dusk, so about the only time I see a commercial is in prime time. What’s the average cost of a commercial during prime time? Glad you asked. The average 30 second spot on a cable network sells for $115,000 on average. A lot of variables play into that so it could be more or less depending on the quantitative analysis of the audience. For example, a thirty second spot in a new episode of the Big Bang Theory cost nearly $300,000 last year. Ten thousand dollars per second. https://fitsmallbusiness.com/tv-advertising/
How many pharmaceutical commercials do you see when you sit down to watch network television? All of them, right? News, Sports, Sitcoms, Drama…every possible genre on the box comes complete with a steady dose (pardon the pun) of medication information complete with joyous music and images of miserable people instantly looking happy after taking a pill that changes their entire life for the better….Oh Yeah…and you might just lose a little weight too. Just in the time I’ve been writing this, whatever company owns Humira has probably spent $10,000,000 on ESPN alone. A television executive would be out of their mind to bite the hand that’s feeding them that well. Ever wonder why you hear so much about the opioid crisis on your local news every night but only on the national news when something earth shattering happens? Advertising during local news and programming is relatively cheap and only reaches a small market….those commercials are reserved for car lots and local businesses…they lose nothing by reporting negatively about the drug companies.
That’s why we don’t hear of the dark side of the pharmaceutical market at the national level. Politicians wouldn’t dream of hurting their campaign contributions or the perks rolling in from lobbyists and the media wouldn’t dream of pissing off a pharmaceutical company and losing the advertising dollars out of their programming.
So…in a word…money. Radix Malorum est Cupiditas…the root of evil is greed, not guns.
We can fix this, people. I guarantee you that 90% of those kids won’t need the anti-depressants if they grow up with dinner on the table and family around the table every evening…family game nights, campfires and bedtime stories. Just knowing that there’s someone there to talk to when they have a problem…a safe place where they’re loved….just the simplest forms of human empathy would make a huge difference in the lives of the kids and that difference would put an end a lot of the behavior that ends with a prescription. “Hugs are better than drugs” isn’t just about the illegal drugs, friends. And while we’re hitting the pharmaceutical companies in the wallet by fixing our kids, we may want to take a look at voting out the politicians who are lining their pockets and financing their campaigns with drug money. If we’re going to take our society back, we’re going to have to fight the dragon from both directions.
Now….if you’ve managed to read this far, y’all are going to need to come visit me in prison. The research I did while I was putting this together had me searching biographical information on mass shooters, statistics on psychotropic drugs and firearms sales as well as how much money politicians receive from drug companies…..I’m pretty sure I’ve always been a couple watch lists, but I may have just set a new personal record. Oh…and I’d never consider suicide, so if I mysteriously off myself this week, just assume foul play was involved.
In all seriousness though, the websites I’ve linked in this post are just the easiest ones to navigate and understand. The information can be verified on a host of other equally credible sites.